Jonathan Mirsky: China - Five Pounds of Facts

Many ambitious parents in the UK are now seeing to it that their children learn Chinese, which, Wilkinson reports, is now the mother tongue of 10 percent of the world’s population; it may soon be almost double that. English, meanwhile, is spoken by 25 to 30 percent, but this dominance is declining. Will Chinese replace English as the global language? Wilkinson thinks not. The same alphabet is used in hundreds of world languages, while Chinese characters, which must be memorized one by one, are used mostly in China. “The prestige of English as the language of the rich and powerful may still survive intact,” he concludes, “Chinese will gain in influence as a second language.” If Wilkinson, for whom spoken and written Chinese must be much like a second language, says so, that’s good enough for me.

Mein Blog befasst sich in einem umfassenden Sinn mit dem Verhältnis von Wissen, Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft. Ein besonderes Augenmerk richte ich dabei auf die Aktivitäten des Medien- und Dienstleistungskonzern Bertelsmann und der Bertelsmann Stiftung.